Perfume Genius’s 2020 record Set My Heart on Fire Immediately starts with a deep breath, like the microphone is almost touching Mike Hadreas’s lips. He inhales, then out comes an exhaled lament: half of my whole life is gone. That first line grabs you by the collar; you’re suddenly standing at attention. Let it drift and wash away, he continues over a massive, reverberant organ. For a single line, a ghostly double of his voice joins him: it was just a dream I had. Then he repeats himself, this time all alone: it was just a dream. The organ stops, “Whole Life” holds a silence for a second, then a twinkling piano stretches the moments before the song’s full instrumentation comes in: electric guitars, bass, a viola and a violin, synths, drums, even a glockenspiel. By the time the song ends, its different pieces will have taken turns at the top of the mix to ultimately give way to Hadreas’s falsetto as it punctures through the song’s final, swelling movement with two drawn-out lines: “shadows soften toward some tender light / in slow motion I leave them behind.”
I learned about Perfume Genius when I saw him open for Sufjan Stevens on the Age of Adz tour in 2010. That concert is a blur now; all I remember with certainty is the sheer force of Mike Hadreas on stage, by himself, with absolutely no one and nothing else. Each album since then has been, musically and thematically, an evolution from the last. But one motif remains, always, unshakeable: the lone, individual self struggling to break through the cacophony of the things that don’t fit it anymore, accepting the release, and even begging for the decimation, of everything it once wanted — needed, even.
A few years after the Sufjan show, I picked up Perfume Genius’s 2012 album Put Your Back N 2 It. While some of the songs on Back hint at the levels of lush, baroque instrumentation Perfume Genius has reached on more recent albums like No Shape and Set My Heart, many of its tracks carry an implacable spareness, Hadreas’s lyrics painting a desperately barren landscape defined not by what is there but by what is missing. In the three-song run from “No Tear” to “17” to “Take Me Home,” Hadreas wrestles with the causes of the barrenness, first blaming it on some unknown other: “roof comes down / you leave me with nothing.” He seizes some agency in “17,” singing plainly over a lonely piano:
Take everything away
This gnarled, weird face
This ripe swollen shape
I want blank
I want frozen lake
By the time we get to the deeply percussive “Take Me Home,” his loneliness has become too much to bear. The nothingness isn’t just around him anymore; in his lonely desperation, he toys with the idea of becoming it himself: “I'll be so quiet for you / look like a child for you / be like a shadow of a shadow / of a shadow for you.”
Put Your Back N 2 It is heavy with desolation, its themes of love lost, sexual abuse, and abandonment right on the surface, made accessible by the record’s relative instrumental spareness. After years of not listening to it, it found me again last spring, when my life felt like it was being decimated. I reveled in having my feelings mirrored back at me and let myself be shocked by the songs as if listening to them for the first time.
Then, about a month later, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately came out. Sonically, it’s much bigger than Back, whole walls of sound rushing toward your head throughout. Even its sparest tracks (“Jason,” “Leave”) deal in dense, unctuous richness. But the desolation, the casting away of everything that once mattered, the absolute nothingness, persists. It first shows its face in those opening lines in “Whole Life” and reappears in almost every track. In “Nothing at All,” Hadreas sings “I got what you want, babe / I got what you need, son” over and over, his voice getting deeper with each line, except here the delivery is not flirty, or even taunting, like it might be coming out of someone else’s mouth. It’s a threat — I’ve got what you want; do you dare come and get it? — repeated until he finally reveals exactly what that is: “nothing at all.” The album’s slow, drawn-out closing track, “Borrowed Light,” starts with a daring refusal — “No, God. / Not this time.”— then Hadreas’s voice eventually floats to the top of all the cloudy synths to let out a fatal command: “just let that old thing die.”
I’ve spent the better part of the last year listening to Set My Heart, letting the impossible tension of an oblivion made huge surprise me again and again. Each track burrows deeply, its cutting intimacy reminding me of my soft, mortal center, even as I’ve let myself believe for a second that I am just as huge, just as unbreakable, as the dense metal guitars in “Describe” or the galloping drums in “Your Body Changes Everything.” Set My Heart’s oblivion is not temporary relief; it’s not absolution — it’s inevitability. It’s the ashes from which anything new must grow. I keep making jokes that I wish to be bludgeoned to death with some of the songs on Set My Heart. It’s perhaps an extreme reaction, but this is extreme music whose only logical conclusion feels like it must be exactly that: the ultimate exposure, gore, the end, finally, nothing, nothing at all.
This is one of several pieces on Perfume Genius. You can read the other ones here, here, here, and here.